I grow up in Brixton South London, at a time when it was not cool to be living in Brixton. As wary as we were of our environment and some of the negative influences that operated there, we were also young and excitable. My upbringing was at best dysfunctional and at worst, it was criminal. Both in the sense of how my mother administered her often daily dose of punishment to myself and my siblings, and increasingly as a result of the missing male role model in my life and the lack of emotional guidance from my mother. Fights at school, from as early as I can remember were the norm for me, and theft from anyone or anywhere, friends, family and strangers, was just something we did to get by.

By the time I was 16 I was in a gang, by the time I was 18 I had lost my first friend to life stopping moment of madness that was gun crime. This event for me was quite unbelievable and pivotal, the reality of the lives some of my friends were living was haunting. I decided to go to college as far away from London as my desire for change would take me. The next two years saw me realise my passion for graphic design.

In the two years that I was away from London, I lost even more friends to knife and gun crime, and knew of others who had been caught in the cross hairs of this wicked lifestyle. But even with all of this mayhem, there was another event that flew comfortably underneath my radar. This event was tightly wrapped in my blind spot and covered in conjecture and mis information. I’ve since realized that this was mainly due to my own ignorance and a seemingly cultural inability to relate or comprehend to a situation that was so alien to me. When a close friend of mine was diagnosed with Schizophrenia, to me, he was just seen as having gone mad. Our history and friendship up to that point disappeared in a simple doctor’s diagnosis, I was unable to see beyond his strange illness. I was unable to see beyond the nasty and insensitive comments labelled at him by my peers, I had no compassionate bass line for which to draw a tolerant conclusion or understanding.

In the years that have followed my colourful youth, not only have I been on the wrong side of a painful blade that could have simply ended my life, but I’ve also more recently suffered the debilitating and crippling effects of depression and anxiety. Which in my case, came hand in hand with thoughts of death. The effects of depression and anxiety still live with me, and it is only though becoming a father, and the work I am now doing on mental health and anti-social behavior within the black community, that I am able to better understand the depth and complexities of these issues.

My workOver the last 15 years I have developed a wealth of experience working as a self-shooting Producer/Director and editor in film and video. I have worked for: ITV Studios, The BBC, Haymarket Publishing, EMAP Metro, Tate Modern and Sky Movies. My corporate clients include, Nationwide building society, Kellogg's, Santander, Aldi and many more.

When I first started as a film maker, after leaving a very successful career as a group art editor in magazine design, I wanted to, and was moved to create a visual narrative that would allow the younger generation to more easily engaged with the corrosive debate on knife and gun crime. I wanted to present films that showed their realities through their eyes and mouths, the way we did this was by using street poetry to deliver the message. The first of these films was called Gritty City which was made in 2006. As the years rolled by so did the films. It could became next, followed byWayne and Jim,then Ikon Unkut,and a host of others.